Moving Fast And Breaking Things

The pace of the new Administration

Facebook’s old internal motto, seemingly coined by Zuckerberg himself seems to broadly reflect the Silicon Valley ethos as a whole:

“Move Fast and Break Things.”

Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash

I think it largely holds true. The pace of technological innovation over my lifetime has been blazingly fast, and seems to be getting faster by the day. This in turn has disrupted, broken, old ways of doing things and entire old industries.

Even we writers aren’t immune. Substack is pulling the very best and brightest writers from old media outlets, but in turn seemingly every writer is now deeply concerned about the impact Ai Large Language Models will have on our craft.

President Trump has been in office this second term for 17 days.

The pace of those 17 days has been unlike anything any living American has ever seen.

Radical changes are being proposed and undertaken, throughout the Federal government. So quickly that the media can’t even keep up. The ‘trade war’ with Canada and Mexico that lasted a few hours is a prime example, media was still discussing its potential impacts on American consumers long after the tariffs were lifted.

Undoubtedly, this pace can be disconcerting. Equally undoubtedly, many of these measures across government will eventually be stopped by either Congress or the Courts. And that’s OK. Our Founding Fathers put strong checks and balances in our system of government for very good reasons. Those checks and balances have protected us from the worst impulses of man for centuries now.

Looking at all of this, I think it is fair to say that the guiding principle of this new administration is that of Silicon Valley.

Move Fast and Break Things.

Many see that as a very bad thing. We hear that message repeated in traditional media. We see it in protests, and we can’t miss the whining of some members of Congress.

But the majority of American people want to see it. At the point of the last election 76% of people said that they were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the United States.¹ People believe that there is waste, fraud, and abuse throughout the Federal government, and voters cast their ballots last November to have it addressed.

Indeed it should be addressed. Our budget deficits and the resulting national debt is clearly unsustainable. Excessive Federal regulation is a drain on our economy, and our personal freedoms. Prior to the election only 2% of Americans said that they trusted the Federal government to do what is right just about always, and only 21% trusted it to do what is right most of the time.²

At this point in our history, the American people want leaders who will move fast and break things in an effort to address the problems we face.

And traditional media or congressional complaints aren’t going to change that. Indeed only 31% of Americans have either a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the media.³ Congress is even worse with only 17% of Americans approving of its performance.⁴ Complaints from these individuals and institutions are falling on deaf ears.

In recent days there have been reports about consideration by some in Congress of ‘shutting down the government’ by refusing to pass spending bills as a way of slowing down the Administration’s juggernaut.

That won’t work either.

The American people have gone through enough of these ‘government shutdowns’ now to know that they are anything but.

The only things that actually close are those things that cause pain to American citizens, such as our National Parks and Passport processing. Big government, all those things rife with fraud, waste, and abuse just keep right on going. And all those government employees ‘thrown out of work?’ Well, whenever a spending bill is eventually passed all the income they missed is made up for.

These ‘government shutdowns’ are nothing but theater, and people have that figured out now. The threat, even the reality, won’t work. It won’t stop the push to Move Fast and Break Things.

Will long term good come from all of this?

I don’t know, and indeed no one can know. Only time will tell.

But it is undoubtedly what the majority of American people want, and there are no signs of it slowing down yet.

1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1669/general-mood-country.aspx

2. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust-in-government-1958-2024/

3. https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx

4. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx